After all the furor last month, the Hamtramack city council surrendered to the siren sound of the Islamic call to prayer
"My main objection is simple," she said. "I don’t want to be told that Allah is the true and only God five times a day, 365 days a year. It’s against my constitutional rights to have to listen to another religion evangelize in my ear." At City Hall last week, before the final vote on the loudspeaker, a crowd of more than 100 crammed into a room, with dozens more listening or arguing in the hallway outside.
Chuck Schultz, 49, a computer programmer from nearby Grosse Pointe, spoke against the measure. "Everyone talks about their rights," Schultz said. "The rights of Christians have been stripped from them. Last week, there were Muslims praying downstairs, in a public building. If Christians tried to do that, the ACLU would shut us down."
Council members emphasized that there was nothing technically preventing the mosque from amplifying its call to prayer, even without amending the city’s noise ordinance, and compared the amplification to the chiming of church bells. The amendment just gave government officials leverage to limit the volume and hours of the broadcasts, said Councilman Scott Klein.
Motlib said the mosque had applied for approval "because we want to be good neighbors." Paradoxically, the call to prayer is one that even most of the Muslims at al-Islah mosque cannot understand, because they speak Bengali rather than Arabic, said Khan, the mosque secretary |